He Said / She Said
For years I only wrote in first person personal. Everything I penned was a confession of my sins. On occasion I’d try to distance myself from my writing a bit and utilize the third person; still writing about myself but masking it with an outside observer’s point of view.
I wish I could remember what finally pushed me out of this comfortable zone. It might have been the works of David Goodis, a terrific pulp author from Philadelphia. Goodis slides easily from third person to second to first when his characters are in times of distress; the second person taking on the voice of a character’s conscience, pushing and needling the hapless protagonist. Or, perhaps it was advice from a writing manual. Regardless, I finally broke out of the first person personal prison and stretched my mind; trying to cast my eyes into the head of another person, even if that person was just a character in one of my torrid tales.
My first “break out” in that regard most assuredly had to be the story “The Houseguest” in which I took a tale that I had been writing and rewriting for years and gave it new life by changing the point of view from one character to another. I don’t know if this switch was successful but it was the first time I ever made it to any kind of ending point of the story.
Being a fan of Kurosawa’s Rashomon I’ve long been fascinated by the way two (or more) people can perceive the same event through the veil of their experiences. I’ve always wanted to play out a scene in real life and then have the other party and me write out our experiences and put these two stories together, comparing and contrasting our perceptions. That has yet to happen but in the meantime I’ve done what I could with my own writing, playing with the notion of innacurate memories.
I couldn’t take any more. “Wait just a second,” I said, getting up. I had a feeling I knew what was coming and wanted to put a stop to it before Faith could open her mouth again. – Friday Night Plans: Louis
“Now wait just a darned minute,” Louis whined. He tried to get up and I shot him a look that put him right back in his seat. – Friday Night Plans: Faith
True, the differences are subtle but they’re there and they’re intentional. Others have been wildly different. I suppose it’s odd to care about such verrisimilitude when writing a smutty cuckolding story but it matters to me. I kept the stories of “Faith” and “Louis” separate. I’ve had fun with others where I’ve switched the point of view midway through and others where I vary the POV from one paragraph to the next (more or less) such as Cerebral Trainee Subject: Susan.
Varying the point of view can offer new shades of detail as well as providing an obvious point of empathy for a reader. Seeing the world through another’s eyes is what makes fiction such a wonderful journey.
